The God Of Small Things - Friday

‘You’ve a studio flat to look at later.’ Announces negotiator S as I re-enter the office after the joyless  run to pick up a low-calorie, taste-free, meal deal.

‘What’s that going to be like?’ Asks trainee F gormlessly.

‘The stationery cupboard.’ I tell him, dumping the wafer-thin sandwich, pseudo-crisps and tired-looking fruit combo on the desk.

I follow F’s gaze towards the aforementioned paper and pen repository. God, I sometimes long for less litigious times when it was acceptable to clout a dozy trainee around the ear, or just ask for his office keys, without verbal warnings in writing and a multi-stage disciplinary process monitored by Human  Resources' drones and legal insurance companies. I’ll have to settle for sending F on an afternoon’s leaflet dropping in the rain.

‘He means it will be compact.’ Says S to F, gently.

‘Cramped.’ Adds assistant manager T, who seems to have ducked the undersized valuation somehow.

‘Bijou, even.’ Contributes fat mortgage man M with a chubby-chopped smile. That confuses F even further, until lettings lush B adds:

‘Shite.’

I vividly remember when I first visited a studio flat, back in the late eighties when developers and speculators were busy maximising profit and minimising square-footage, in shabbily converted, once grand, Victorian family homes.

Tagging along with the kindly surveyor I was training with, we entered a top floor roof space, once designated for servants or Not Needed On Journey labelled packing cases, to find a plaster boarded space with sloping roof lines, fit only for Snow White cast members.

As I tried to hold the old-school tape measure to the widest extremity, I was thinking if this was the lounge, with a DIY style galley kitchen incongruously in one corner, how pokey was the bedroom going to be?

The first door I tried was minuscule shower room with no natural light, a wheezy extractor fan, and a toilet wedged so tight to the angled ceiling that you’d never piss standing up. The second door I tugged, expecting to find the sleeping accommodation, turned out to conceal a clumsily-lagged hot water tank.

‘So they sleep in the lounge?’ I remember asking, hesitantly. A somewhat smarter, and smarter-dressed version of F, on reflection.

‘It’s a new concept.’ Enlightened the old, Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, with a frown. ‘It won’t catch on. I’m going to down-value it.’

‘I’m not sure I’d want to buy a flat that small.’ Speculates F, once he’s finally grasped the concept of turning your sweaty sofa into a bed at the end of an evening.

‘Just as well, you couldn’t afford it on your salary.’ Says M with a hearty guffaw. ‘Particularly when you’re on commission. Not even I could fudge the employer’s reference enough to find a lender for you.’ He adds, unkindly.

‘We all have to start somewhere.’ Counters S, fiercely. 

‘Yeh? Well if I can’t bolt on endowments, or PPI sales any more, I’m not about to risk my licence fabricating income am I?’ Sneers M.

‘Can’t he self-certificate?’ Asks B from her lettings enclave.

Only for sick notes.

‘We need to trade up.’ Says the earnest young woman later. She has an obvious swelling in her belly, as her stooping boyfriend nods in agreement and tries not to bang his head on the ceiling. There’s not enough room to swing a cat in the tired-looking conversion, and yet paradoxically, they have a hissy furball in residence, one that is weaving between my legs, purring aggressively and shedding fur all over my dark blue trousers. I can feel the first sneeze bubbling up.

I can’t see they’ll even get back what they paid for the pokey little studio flat. The dodgy developer helped fund the deposit, probably on the back of an inflated sale price and a complicit broker. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, particularly as the poor women is expecting a baby shortly. I wouldn’t mind killing the cat though.

Not a great success.

Price upset them.

Suit needs cleaning - and turns out she wasn’t pregnant.

Fail.

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Muck And Brass - Saturday

‘Do we have to do this?’ I whine ungraciously to my wife.

‘Sometimes you have to get down and dirty.’ She replies pulling on the rubber gloves.

‘But I’d rather watch the football.’ I tell her, wondering if my back will be up to this.

‘Put it on record and you can come back to it when we’re done. You never know you might even enjoy it in a weird way.’

So I stoop down and lift the up and over door.

I must look at scores of homes a week and have seen thousands over my, less than glorious career, but rarely do I see a garage containing a car. Yes, you get the occasional motoring geek who concrete paints the floor and has the whole expanse clinically clean and organised like an operating theatre. The type of obsessive oddball who stencils the shape of his tools on the wall where they must be re-hung after use and who organises half-used paint pots in colour coded order, pastels on the left, bolder colours to the right, gloss and white spirit on a separate shelf. But most garages are like mine, full of rubbish yet to go to the tip.

‘I might need that wood one day.’ I tell my wife half-heartedly, as another sneeze erupts from the dust dancing before my eyes in the watery sunlight.

She looks at me scornfully. My DIY skills, or lack of them, are legendary in this household, there’s nowhere to hang rusting tools on any of the wall-space here. In fact, the only hooks I tried to mount on the block-work are now lopsided, with one rawlplug protruding from an oversized hole, as a crooked stepladder hangs at an improbable angle. I’ll fix that later.

The six foot – approx two metres, but buyers should take their own measurements as figures are for guidance purposes only – piece of skirting, is duly posted in the back of my company car, alongside the old pine shelving, several spent bike tyres, a brace of obsolete computers, the once top-of-the-range Sony VHS recorder and my eldest son’s redundant cathode ray television set. Numerous other black bags are wedged in the load space as the car sinks ever lower on its springs. I’m only making one journey.

‘What are these, can we ditch them?’ Asks my wife holding up several hard drives from the spent computer towers. I may not be that handy with a screwdriver but I laboured to remove the old spinning discs from the once expensive machines. You can’t be too careful with personal data and I don’t want some kid in an African village seeing my log on details, or the history I built up before I realised how to, browse in private.

‘Need to keep those, Data Protection Act.’ I tell her officiously. It seems to work. Years of selling have taught me if you say something with enough conviction people invariably believe you.

‘What are these doing here?’ Asks my wife tugging back some big sheets of cardboard I’ve been meaning to recycle for half a decade. I colour up as if she has actually found my Internet search records. Three separate for sale flags, belonging to three different estate agency companies, one of which has gone bust so its board and logo might be worth keeping as a collector’s item, are dustily revealed.

‘Isn’t that theft?’ Scolds my wife as I bounce up and down on the wooden poles and try to break them into manageable sizes. The polypropylene flags aren’t so easily destroyed, I know they burn well every November 5^th but I’m already imagining the difficulty I’m going to have at the municipal dump. They charge for commercial waste and pleading one of the firms no longer exists, isn’t going to cut much ice with the officious waste control operatives.

‘They take down our boards all the time.’ I appeal in mitigation, as I try vainly to fold the fully waterproof, ideal for outdoor applications, fluted sheet advertising hoarding in on itself. Damn that stuff is robust. Not sure which dump bin it will go in, but I’m guessing a couple of millennium to decompose.

I wonder what the score is?

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Rights And Wrongs - Friday

‘This is a pretty crap area really isn’t it?’ States trainee F as I weave the company car in and out of ageing Fords and Vauxhalls parked half on the kerb, half on what’s left of the grass. I hesitate to point out to him that this may be crumbling ex-local authority housing stock but the prices are still way out of his reach.

We’re on our way to measure up a voluntary repossession, the keys and instructions from the lender nestling in my briefcase. At least I know the outgoing owners will be long gone this time, it’s when they are still inside it gets messy. A scruffy brace of teenagers, hoods raised, look at us menacingly as I slow to walking pace to ease between a huge flatbed 4 x 4 and a rusty Citroen Saxo with more differing coloured panels than Joseph’s Technicolor Dreamcoat.

‘How come some houses have all new windows and roof tiles and some are all rundown?’ Asks F pertinently, as I spot the 1950s built semi in question. As if to underscore F’s question, the house we’re about to enter is scruffy, with the exception of a low-level picket fence to the front and a naff-looking windmill, while the adjoining home has updated UPVC and tiling.

‘The next door place is still owned by the council.’ I tell F as we clamber out of the car and I feel several pairs of eyes watching from behind net curtains. The dislike is almost palpable. At least if they key the car it’s not my long-term problem.

‘So they are actually in better nick than the one’s people bought?’ Questions F, brow furrowed.

‘Often.’ I tell him. ‘The people with mortgages can’t afford the upkeep.’

F shrugs and stands aside for me, his bovine brain clearly working on another question more rickety than the gate he’s just opened.

The house is typical of the era. Open-plan front garden, no garage, hence the on-street parking issues. To the side, is a narrow, wire-fence-bounded walk-through to a concrete shed, once for coal, more often full of bikes and rusty prams now.  We stop outside the front door. A door I now open with the shiny new set of keys, as I wonder if the ex-tenant, now ex-owner, regrets exercising their options.

‘So this was, like, one of those right-to-buy jobs then?’ Asks F uncertainly, as we check out, first the cramped under stairs cloakroom, with the temperature of a morgue, then the through lounge/diner to the rear kitchen, fitted with a cheap-looking DIY kitchen units, not quite level. A tap drips mournfully as I glance at the 100-foot garden, wildly overgrown, with the odd discarded push-along toy rising from the grass like some avant-garde entry at the Chelsea flower show.

‘Yes.’ I tell F as I unpack my clipboard and begin scribbling my notes on autopilot. I know the floor plan by heart and could probably guess the measurements it wasn’t for fear of prosecution under that pesky Property Mis-Description Act.

‘It was a mixed blessing.’ I tell F as I continue to jot down the home’s particulars and wonder how I’ll get a decent picture without using PhotoShop.

‘So they all just turned a big profit then moved on?’ Asks F, as we make the upstairs landing and I see the cramped third bedroom and undersized bathroom, and then check out the two bigger bedrooms, both with cheap louver-fronted fitted wardrobes, circa 1970.

‘Those that didn’t run out of money and couldn’t make the payments.’ I tell F.

‘It was that women who invaded the Falklands that done it, was it?’ Says F, throwing me briefly, until I realise he’s talking about Margaret Thatcher. Sometimes I feel really old. Ignoring F’s tenuous grasp on history, I tell him that, as with most things in property, there are winners and losers - and no easy solutions.

‘So this place will be cheap then?’ Concludes F when we are back out by the gate and I’ve taken several snaps, none of which will hide the obvious without artifice and a risk of prosecution. I tell him my suggested number and he almost chokes.

If I’m right, he won’t be buying.

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